CloudMapper: An AWS Visualisation Tool

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CloudMapper is an AWS visualisation tool that’s highly useful for getting an overview of your AWS infrastructure and network setup.

Depending on the number of services, instances, VPCs, and subnets used, getting lost is quite easy, especially when considering that out-of-the-box with AWS there’s no single unified console from which to get an overview of your deployed resources but rather a multitude of consoles, one for each AWS service.

Therefore, keeping track of your infrastructure and keeping your costs in check can be quite a challenge.

CloudMapper alleviates this issue by gathering information about the entire infrastructure for your AWS account and then providing both infrastructure and network diagrams, as well as reporting for your currently deployed resources. The tool is installed on your local machine. So, no information will be shared with third parties.

CloudMapper was especially helpful to me recently when I was debugging a particularly gnarly connectivity issue with an Apache ActiveMQ instance deployed on Amazon MQ for an upcoming chapter on “Push Notifications with Amazon MQ” of our eBook “Stratospheric – From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS“. The ActiveMQ instance simply couldn’t be reached from our sample Todo application and we had no real way of knowing if this was a network issue or rather related to misconfigured security group rules since error messages were of the “Connection failed.”-with-no-further-explanation-given variety.

With CloudMapper visualisations it became immediately obvious that the ActiveMQ instance (or rather: instances since we were using active/standby deployment at first) simply wasn’t available in our application’s VPC, which clearly pointed to a network / routing issue rather than a missing security group rule. From there, fixing the underlying issue (more on that in the upcoming chapter of Stratospheric mentioned before), while not exactly trivial, became possible.

You can find more about CloudMapper from this introductory blog post by AWS security consultant Scott Piper of Duo, the creators of CloudMapper.

CloudMapper is available on GitHub (as open source under a BSD-3-Clause License)

About the author: Bjoern
Independent IT consultant, entrepreneur

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